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Smokey the Bear Has the Matches
Fiction by Scott Gould TJ drove without lights on. His girl Treecie was all but in his lap, a hand wedged between her legs. Both of them all drunk up or stoned, her worse off than him, which could have been something to take advantage of, but she was relatively safe except for TJ’s finger…
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Movie Time
Fiction by Tom Weller The cool air of the theater settles into the Scrap Boys, hits their sunburned skin and sinks into their bones, banishes the heat of the summer, the sunlight and humidity they’ve absorbed wandering downtown streets. The harangues of shopkeepers, the too-cool stares of the high school boys leaning on their shit-box…
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I am the Deafening Silence
Fiction by Alyssa Bushell I am the abstract carpet with head-spinning lines off the elevator on the eighth floor. I am door after door that look the same, the first attempts replying to my key card with an obstinate red blink until one of them lets us in. I am the smell that wafts when…
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Dance the Night Away
Fiction by Bobby Mathews It was the kind of night on Bourbon Street when the heat comes down and smothers you like a jealous sibling holding a feather pillow. The shot girls were busy in their Daisy Dukes and bikini tops, hawking cheap liquor from expensive bottles. Drink the bottom-shelf tequila someone funneled into a…
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Gold
Fiction by Kate Faigen On the edge of town, there’s a gold wall that shimmers like sequins in the sun. Young people come in droves to take pictures in front of it. At the perfect time of day, like witching hour, they emerge—to dance, to shout, to strike poses they’ve perfected in front of mirrors.…
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Just Like Those Killing Floor Blues
Fiction by Colin Brightwell Quitting time at the slaughterhouse is the worst. That’s when that hard rust smell hits my nose and suffocates me. When there’s no more heavy sounds of machinery to drown out the cries of cows not knowing when it’s coming. A hard day on the killing floor, all the sweat and…
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A Lazy Eye
Fiction by Jeff Ewing After his girlfriend runs off with her chiropractor and his brother dies of a disease no one’s seen for fifty years, invisible threats rise like weeds at the edge of Calvin’s field of vision. He tastes poison in the tap water, death in the air thick with smoke half the year.…
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Lyrics for Doomed Lovers
Fiction by Bayveen O’Connell My mood ring’s been stuck on cobalt since I saw you laid out in a grey suit that made you look like an apprentice used-car salesman. Your lips were a Common Blue butterfly pinned taut and can’t have been the same ones that fluttered on mine the summer just gone; when…
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Footsteps in the Snow
Fiction by Matthew McGuirk I followed a few steps behind my father, the faint outlines of his footprints in the spitting snow on that October morning where the light hadn’t quite squinted through the trees. My boots didn’t quite fit each of his tracks, but I could reach with a stretch from one to the…
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End of October
Fiction by Jeannie Prinsen Supper was done. After Russell went down to the parlour to watch the news, Vera started putting things away. She looked at the clock. Twenty after five. Mike down the road usually brought his children around on the early side – the littlest one got cranky as all get-out if he…